


stitches in a scowl

by StarryCleric



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst, Diego Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt Diego Hargreeves, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Protective Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-02 13:00:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20276314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarryCleric/pseuds/StarryCleric
Summary: “Christ, Five,” Diego says. He sucks in a deep breath, chest feeling tight as the words he’d kept buried deep down after the Apocalypse finally start to burst out. “You just don’t get it, do you? That you can’t just run off all the time and ignore what’s behind you?”--A late night drive after the Apocalypse that Wasn't goes wrong for Diego and Five, and while actions can speak louder than words, sometimes words can be plenty loud themselves.





	stitches in a scowl

“I still don’t see why you insisted on driving me,” Five says, crossing his arms petulantly as he props his knees up against the car’s dashboard. “I’m not a child, and I’m perfectly capable of driving to the grocery store and back.”

“Get your feet off my dash,” Diego says, swatting at Five’s knees while keeping his eyes firmly road. “And you know damn well that you’ll look like a thirteen year old to any cop that sees you behind the wheel, so there’s no way I’m going to let you tear around the streets.” Not to mention he had absolutely no intention of going back to the police station if he could avoid it. 

Five yanks his legs out of the way of Diego’s hand, grumbling under his breath and running his fingers over the spine of the old red journal that hadn’t left his side in days. 

Diego glances down at him with a frown. It had been ten days since Five’s last desperate jump had yanked them back into the past, just in time to prevent Harold Jenkins from stealing Dad’s notebook and for Allison to rumor him into leaving the city immediately. Since then, the six of them (seven if you counted Ben, who Klaus insisted was still hanging around) had been lingering around the mansion, stuck in some kind of emotional limbo where they all knew they desperately needed to talk to each other but with no one daring to make the first move. The day of the Apocalypse had come and gone, and Five had spent the next forty eight hours locked in his room, snarling at Vanya and Klaus to leave him alone when they each tried to convince him to come out. 

Diego was personally just fine with giving the kid his space, since he had spent most of the past week in his old room as well, throwing knives at the ceiling and doing anything he could to keep the image of Patch’s dead body hanging limp in his arms from appearing every time he closed his eyes. Of course, the instant they had sent Jenkins packing, he had called her, practically hyperventilating while waiting for her to pick up the phone. The instant he heard her voice on the other end – _ “Hello? Diego is that…” _ – he hung up and retreated back into the dark of his bedroom to lay on the bed and keep his mind resolutely blank. 

The rest of the family seemed happy enough to leave each other alone while they processed how close they’d all come to ending the world, until finally, about an hour ago, Five jumped to the living room in a flash of blue light to inform them they were all out of sandwich supplies and he was going to get them some more. Diego had scoffed, told Five he wasn’t driving anywhere alone with no license and no money, and to get in his car so Diego could drive them both over to the store. 

As Five continues glowering out the window at the soft orange light of the street lamps, Diego isn’t entirely sure why he’d insisted on driving when he did know Five was perfectly capable of getting around on his own. There had just been something about the slightly grey pallor of his face and the way he’d refused to unclench his fingers from around that damn journal that had Diego instinctively reaching for his car keys.

And speaking of Dad’s journal…

“So when are you going to let the rest of us get a look at what’s inside that book?” Diego says, aiming for nonchalance but missing the mark, judging by how Five’s eyebrows shoot upwards.

“Never,” Five grinds out. “This book is absolutely worthless, and just goes to show how crazy the old man was.”

“Which is why you won’t let anyone else touch it, obviously,” Diego says, rolling his eyes.

Five’s scowl deepens, but he doesn’t respond.

Diego sighs. The car behind him honks, seemingly upset at being forced to drive the speed limit. He flicks on his turn signal to let it pass by. “I mean, come on, Five. You’ve clearly read the whole thing already and it made you upset. I think the rest of us have a right to know what’s in there.”

“Clearly, huh?” Five twitches, tucking the journal closer in his arms.

“Yes, clearly. How stupid do you think I am?”

“Very.”

“Hysterical, old man.” He glances in the rearview mirror. Once again, the idiot driver is riding his ass instead of just passing by. Well, too bad for him. Diego was staying _ away _ from illegal activity for a while, which happened to include speeding. “You think you can just get away from keeping secrets from us again? Remember how that worked out last time?”

“It worked well enough before you all decided to lock Vanya away in the basement,” Five says, expression turning even stormier.

Diego stares at him. “You don’t think running off on your own had anything to do with the world almost ending? Jesus, man, even you can’t be that stupid.”

“Stupid? I was doing what I had to do to _ stop _ the end of the world, and the rest of you assholes would have just gotten in the way!” 

On one level, Diego was trying to be patient with his brother, who was clearly trying to process some shit. But that thought was buried underneath the absolute injustice of what Five was saying. He clenches his hands around the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white. “And while you were busy running around following useless leads, you didn’t even stop to think about the rest of us, did you?”

“Those ‘useless’ leads were all I had to go on –”

“Christ, Five,” Diego says. He sucks in a deep breath, chest feeling tight as the words he’d kept buried deep down after the Apocalypse finally start to burst out. “You just don’t get it, do you? That you can’t just run off all the time and ignore what’s behind you?”

The lights outside as they drive by alternate from highlighting Five to leaving him in darkness, but Diego can still see as Five’s face shifts from an angry red to a sick, pale color. His voice is still tinted with irritation. “I do not run off all the time just to ignore you!”

“Don’t you, though? You ran off and fucking led a bunch of serial killers right to our house, you got Klaus kidnapped, you got my friend killed…”

And wasn’t that just the kicker, the fact that Five’s little adventures off to God knows where ended with Eudora lying in a puddle of blood in a shitty motel room, with Diego pressing his hands to the gory wound and begging her to wake up, to sleepless nights where it’s all he can do to keep from screaming when he sees her body in his mind’s eye, even though he knows that timeline is gone and Patch is still alive.

Five’s mouth opens and closes, seemingly speechless for a moment. 

The car behind them finally swerves around to aggressively pass them by and Diego curses as he pulls out of the way. He can feel the rage wafting off his brother, but the tightness in his chest keeps him from saying anything.

“I wasn’t the one who killed your friend, Diego,” Five finally says, his tone icy. “And I didn’t…”

He drifts off, narrowing his eyes.

“You didn’t what?” Diego takes his eyes off the road to look down at Five, who’s staring ahead intently.

Five snatches his arm and in the blink of an eye, they’re both being squeezed through the impossible pressure of a spatial jump as the car speeds ahead of them. Diego barely has a chance to gasp as the air is forced out of his lungs, when they’re flung to the ground at the speed the car had been going onto the grass beside the road. The two of them hit the dirt with a painful thud and tumble for a few yards before rolling to a stop. Diego feels battered and scraped but otherwise unharmed as he rolls onto his back, panting for breath and trying to wrap his head around what just happened.

Next to him, Five is also laying on his back, heaving and sweaty from the strain of jumping with a passenger. Diego groans and props himself up on sore forearms. “What... the actual fuck was that, Five?”

Five chokes in a hurried breath, clutching at his ribs. Somehow he’d held onto the journal through the jump, but rolling with it rammed against his chest couldn’t have felt good. “Hazel and Cha-Cha from this timeline… haven’t dealt with them yet.”

The mention of the two temporal assassins makes Diego’s heart stutter. “So why…?”

A hundred feet away, their car crashes into the one ahead of it, which Diego now realizes had slammed on its brakes the instant he and Five blinked away. The sound of screeching metal makes him wince, but doesn’t cover up the sight of the woman with the pink dog mask and several dark clothed men armed with large rifles clambering out of the car. Two of them get thrown to the ground as the car is jolted, which gives Diego enough time to haul Five to his feet and take off running before bullets start streaking by him.

Five spits out a curse beside him and snatches his arm again. There’s a sickening swooping sensation as Diego is dragged through another jump, the pressure of space folding around him threatening to crush him entirely before they both pop out the other end, hunched behind their own partially wrecked car as the agents fan out in the opposite direction. Diego feels nauseous from the jump and can only imagine that Five must be feeling worse based on how green he’s gone, but they don’t have time for either of them to throw up. 

“Do you have a gun in your car?” Five hisses into Diego’s ear. “We’ve got to take them out and you don’t have enough knives.”

Diego wants to scoff, because of course he has enough knives, he _ always _ has enough knives, but Five’s gaze has gone steely and he genuinely looks ready to kill at the slightest provocation. He shakes his head. “No guns, I didn’t think to bring one on a trip to the store.”

Above them, the glass from the windows shatters as bullets pepper the other side of the car. Someone must have spotted them and now Diego can hear the thudding of boots running towards them. He grabs Five’s elbow, all thoughts of their argument forgotten in favor of _ get my brother out of here in one piece _. “I’ll hold them off while you jump back there and snatch one of their guns.”

Five looks like he wants to argue, but Diego just yanks a knife out of the sheath around his waist and presses it into his hand just so he has something to defend himself with before jumping up and yelling, “Hey assholes!” as loud as he can. 

Instantly, Five disappears in a flash, the gunmen and Cha-Cha snap their rifles up at him, and Diego barely has a chance to send two throwing knives streaking through the air and into the necks of the men closest to him before his left shoulder and upper arm explode with pain. He’s not exactly sure he thought this out very well, as his face and the pavement are splattered with blood that came out of nowhere. He drops to the ground with a thud. 

His head thunks against the road, vision sparking white and black. Or maybe those are just the streetlights that are swirling above him? It’s hard to tell all of a sudden and his left arm is positively shrieking at him. He looks down at the ground, at the red puddle that’s spreading… really fast. He hopes Five made it out of the way, even though he’s still mad at him. It sounds like he did based on the scuffling on the other side of the car. 

This might have been a bad idea. 

It’s only with half a mind he instinctively drags himself partially beneath the car. His left arm is useless at the moment and the rest of him seems to be reeling. The word “shock” floats through his mind in much the same way Patch’s dead face always tries to, so he shoves it away and tries to get his vision to come back into focus. 

That seems be a little bit out of his reach, so he closes his eyes and tries to focus his hearing instead. He can hear repeated gunshots and pounding on the pavement. Voices yelling at each other to get back in formation. Some sort of sucking noise that’s followed by a flash of blue light that still pushes through his closed eyelids, and the occasional thump of a body hitting the ground. This continues on for a few minutes, he can’t exactly be sure, before something latches around his ankle and yanks him out from underneath the car.

Diego lashes out, kicking as hard as his numb body will allow, before he recognizes the blurry face splashed with red slapping his cheek and telling him to knock it off. 

He blinks rapidly, not that it does any good. “Five, aren’t you supposed to be gone?” His voice sounds distant and warbly. 

Five rolls his eyes before sucking in a breath and hauling him through one more spatial jump that feels even worse than before. Diego’s not exactly sure how a teleport can feel shaky and unstable, but that’s the only way he can describe the excruciating pressure before being spit out the other side, with Five clutching his shoulders and practically hyperventilating above him. 

They’re in the backseat of the car, only a few feet away from where they were before, but this jump seems to have knocked something loose in Diego’s chest. His shoulder, which had been starting to go numb with pain, is suddenly flaring with renewed vigor and Diego half shrieks before he can stop himself. 

Five shakes his head, blinking and pressing a hand to his forehead like it’s hurting him, before he rips off his stupid Umbrella Academy jacket and presses it onto Diego’s shoulder. Hard. 

Diego shouts when his vision whites out, and barely manages to haul himself back to consciousness while Five taps his face violently, telling him to keep his hand there and not let up while he drives them away. 

“You can’t drive, you’re only thirteen,” Diego mumbles while the roof of the car swirls above him. His chest hurts where his heart is knocking against his ribs, and his lungs refuse to expand where the bullets carved through him. Five pulls off his belt uses it to strap the wadded up jacket over his shoulder and cinch it tight around his arm. 

“Shut up,” Five says, and all Diego notices is how shaky his voice is before the ground seems to fall away beneath him and everything goes dark.

\---

The first thing Diego notices is that there’s something cool running through his veins that feels so much nicer than whatever he’d been feeling before everything went all dark and cold. The second thing he notices is the slight humming coming from above his head.

His eyelids weigh about a thousand pounds each, but there’s something deep inside his chest that says he needs to fight to open them. 

He sucks in a breath with lungs that feel like they’ve finally remembered how to work, and the humming above him stops.

“Diego? Are you awake?”

The voice is soft, lilting, and familiar, something else that makes Diego’s heart feel like it’s about to explode. He cracks open his eyes to meet the blue ones of his mother, sitting on the edge of his bed while she fiddles with the IV port taped into his arm. 

“Mom?” he whispers, still surprised as ever to see her alive after their jump back in time. He doesn’t know what to do as she pats his hand kindly and stands up.

“Good afternoon, sleepy head,” she says. “You’ve been asleep for most of the day, after you got back with Five.” 

Diego blinks at her, but she continues on as though she hasn’t noticed his disorientation. “Now, the stitches in your shoulder were a bit sloppy, since Five said he put them in a hurry, so you shouldn’t move around too much in case you rip them, all right?”

“Five stitched me up?” Diego asks slowly. He looks around the room. He’s in his own bedroom, not the clinically sterile med room on the first floor, which surprises him. Not that he’s complaining. He’s always hated that room, and all the memories of being stitched back together after any knife-related accidents in his training as a kid. His roaming gaze settles on the uncomfortable wooden chair in the corner, which is currently occupied by the pale, exhausted looking form of his sleeping little (older?) brother.

“Yes, he said he did it in the car before driving you back here,” Mom says, giving him a soft smile. “If he’d waited just a few minutes longer, I could have done them a bit more neatly, but he was insistent that you get taken care of as soon as possible. He was very worried, you see.”

Her words seem to be taking a long time to move from her mouth to his ears to his brain. “Oh.”

“The pain medication might be making you a little bit tired as well,” Mom says. “You should go back to sleep, before they wear off. Your shoulder is probably going to be uncomfortable for a while, but it will heal completely eventually.”

That explained why everything still felt fuzzy, even after he’d been asleep for almost a whole day. 

“Is he awake?” 

Diego looks over to the corner, where Five is rubbing his eyes vigorously and unfolding himself from the chair. Their eyes meet, and a second later Five jumps to his side on the bed. Up close, Diego can see the dark circles under his eyes and the little cuts and bruises around his knuckles. He frowns.

“How are you feeling?” Five asks.

“...I’m fine,” Diego says slowly. “Pretty doped up at the moment.”

Five glances up at their mother, who is still hovering by Diego’s head. “Mom, could you give us a second to talk? Alone?”

She smiles and pats Diego’s shoulder gently. “Whatever you boys want. I’ll be right outside if you need me.” She walks out of the room, and Diego’s heart twists a little to see her go, but Five has already pushed his way to be directly in front of his field of vision.

“What is it?” Diego asks as soon as the door shuts. He’s still feeling cloudy and exhausted, and he’s not ready to get into any sort of fight based on the stormy expression Five is currently sporting.

“I just wanted to say…” Five says, and then stops. Diego squints at him as he bites down on his lip, like he’s actually thinking before spitting out whatever it is he wants to say.

After a few seconds of silence, Diego huffs out a sigh. “What happened to Cha-Cha and Hazel back there?”

“I took care of Cha-Cha and the rest of them. Hazel wasn’t there. He must have already skipped out on the Commission by this point in the timeline,” Five answers. Then, before Diego can ask any other follow up questions, he rushes ahead and says, “You know I didn’t mean to run away from you, right?”

There’s another beat of silence.

“Last time, I mean. I went ahead without you because I thought you would slow me down, but I didn’t think… I mean, I didn’t do it because I wanted to get away from you.” Five has a strangely vulnerable expression and Diego isn’t used to the way he’s tripping over his words. “Last time I thought if I just took care of things fast enough, without getting any of you involved, then maybe you all would stay out of trouble. That if I finished things quick enough, then the Commission would stay away from us and we could avoid the Apocalypse entirely.” He scrunched up his nose. “Clearly I underestimated the Commission’s reaction time.”

Diego looks over his brother, the grey tint of his skin that speaks to a deep layer of exhaustion and the wrecked look that he can’t completely hide in his eyes. He remembers his own instinctive reaction to jump up as a distraction to a horde of assassins so Five would have a chance to run away. Somewhere in his brain, a few things slide into place. 

“You were being protective. Trying to get ahead before the problems could get to the rest of us.” 

Five stiffens. His voice is quieter when he says, “I’m never trying to run away, Diego. It’s never… it’s never on purpose. I always mean to come back.” He looks away. “I’m sorry about your friend. From the last timeline. And that you got hurt this time too.”

Diego sucks in a breath, but lets his hand fall onto Five’s knee where it’s resting by his waist. The movement twists at his shoulder, piercing through the veil of pain killers for a moment, before fading away.

“I never mean to, Diego,” Five says. His eyes are far away. Diego is thinking about that first fateful time Five ran out the door, and he knows Five is thinking about it too. 

“I know, Five,” Diego says. His voice is muffled by layers of drugs and pain and exhaustion, and even though one brief talk won’t fix everything that happened, won’t erase the complicated mess of emotions that he still feels rattling around inside, at least it feels like a start. 

His brother turns away, so he can’t quite make out the details of how he schools his expression back into something iron, but it’s too late and Diego has already seen some of the damaged softness on the other side. Without too much thought, he pats Five on the knee, as though that will let him know that Diego means _ it’s going to be okay. _

Five pulls away. “You must be tired. Getting shot is never a walk in the park. I’ll send Mom in to give you some more meds.” He gets up and starts to walk out of the room.

“Hey Five?” 

He stops by the door.

“Thanks for coming back.”

Five clenches his hand on the door frame, waiting for a few seconds in silence, before nodding his head and hurrying out.

Diego closes his eyes and goes back to sleep.


End file.
